Free Republic

In his deeply moving autobiography, "Up From Slavery," Booker T. Washington, who was born in 1856 to an enslaved family on a Virginia plantation, describes the first shred of education he acquired. He was 9 years old when the Civil War ended and, like every other enslaved child, had been deliberately kept illiterate and innumerate. With the arrival of freedom, Washington's family journeyed to West Virginia, where his stepfather arranged a job for him in a salt-furnace. It was there that his education began. "The first thing I ever learned in the way of book knowledge was while working in...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is the latest journalist to mockingly downplay the violence that has plagued some American cities. Krugman on Wednesday shared observations he made during his run in New York City. “I went for a belated NYC run this morning, and am sorry to report that I saw very few black-clad anarchists. Also, the city is not yet in flames,” the economist wrote on Twitter. “The political question of the day is whether Trump can win politically by hammering on a nonexistent crisis of order in America’s cities. You would think not, but I’m not 100%...

China produces more than 820 million tons of steel per year, of which about 100 million tons are exported and sold at a discount overseas. Only about 3 percent of those exports go to the United States, but American steel producers bristle at the competition. So in keeping with the time-honored practice of the US steel industry — "the backbone of American manufacturing," as it proudly calls itself — domestic producers are rising to the challenge.Are they doing so by making their operations more efficient? By improving the quality of the steel they sell? By cutting their prices to maintain market...

LONG BEFORE Tuesday's terror attacks in Brussels, it was clear that Belgium had become a breeding ground for Islamist extremists. Hundreds of Belgian Muslims — as many as 500, according to one estimate — have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight for ISIS, making Belgium by far Europe's leading supplier of foreign jihadists. Last November's horrific slaughter in Paris was masterminded by a Belgian radical, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and at least four of the men who carried out those attacks were from the Brussels district of Molenbeek. One of them was Salah Abdeslam, who was captured in Molenbeek, after an intense...

In a super-blue state like Massachusetts, Super Tuesday was the Election Day that mattered. The outcome in November is a foregone conclusion: The Democratic presidential nominee will win the state by a landslide. So Tuesday's primary election was the only chance Bay State voters had to cast a ballot that might have an impact. I cast mine for Bernie Sanders. As a free-market, strong-defense, Reaganite conservative, I have voted Republican much more often than not. But heading into Super Tuesday, every indication was that Massachusetts Republicans, like GOP primary voters in most other states, were poised to give Donald Trump...

Ramesh Ponnuru, a respected editor and writer for National Review, argues in a recent essay that immigration restrictionism "is rapidly becoming a defining issue for American conservatism." It isn't just that Republicans and conservatives increasingly support tighter control of immigration, Ponnuru writes, but something more overarching. Where a candidate stands on immigration is turning into a litmus test for conservative fidelity. That explains why Marco Rubio, despite his unabashedly conservative voting record, finds himself being scorned in some circles as a "moderate" Republican: because he supported a bipartisan bill that would have expanded legal immigration and offered a path to...

ARE YOU crazy about Barack Obama? Do you fervently hope the next president of the United States will be as similar to the current president as possible? Then Donald Trump may be the candidate for you. Of all the candidates running for president, the one who most resembles the incumbent is not Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Martin O'Malley. To be sure, the Democrats' policy views largely overlap with Obama's. But when it comes to attitude and self-image, it's Obama and Trump who are birds of a feather. Everyone knows about Donald Trump's bottomless narcissism; this is a man...

Of all the reasons to oppose the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev if he is found guilty of the Boston Marathon terror bombings, none is less convincing than the claim that executing the murderer of Krystle Campbell, Lingzi Lu, Martin Richard, and Sean Collier would amount to rewarding him. Seek Tsarnaev's death and you give him just what he craves, runs this argument, which has been made by law professor Alan Dershowitz, criminologist James Alan Fox, and death-penalty critics in the media. Executing Tsarnaev will succeed only in making him a martyr and a hero, they say; it will drive...

Caleb Jacoby, the missing 16-year-old student from Brookline, was found on Thursday evening, said police. The teen, who attends the Maimonides School, is safe and well, according to a tweet from Brookline police. Jacoby disappeared on Monday afternoon and has been the subject of a wide community search aided by social media outreach. He is the son of Boston Globe OpEd columnist Jeff Jacoby.

<p>Caleb Jacoby has been found safe in NYC. Few other details are available.</p>

Just in; Caleb Jacoby has been found. Safe and well more to follow as details become available.

The missing teen, son of Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe columnist, has been found safe. Other reports say he was found in New York City. One blog says Times Square area.

BROOKLINE — Caleb Jacoby, the 16-year-old son of Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby and his wife Laura, has been missing since about 12:30 p.m. Monday. Jacoby is a Brookline resident who is in the 11th grade at Maimonides School. According to a flier distributed by the Combined Jewish Philanthropies and Maimonides School, he is 5-foot-11 and 140 pounds with a thin build and short, light brown hair. Brookline police said the teenager was last seen wearing navy chino pants or jeans, a navy polo shirt, a brown winter jacket with a hood, brown shoes or sneakers, and white socks. He...

Caleb Jacoby of Brookline, MA has been missing since yesterday afternoon. He is 16 years old, and many of you have read, met or heard of Caleb's father, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby. Jeff is a great friend of CAMERA and of Israel. Jeff and his wife Laura, and Caleb need our help now. If you think you have seen Caleb or have any idea of his whereabouts please contact the Brookline Police immediately at (617) 730-2222. Caleb's photo is below, along with a link to a flyer.

Many Americans disdain Rush Limbaugh, some of them high-placed and influential. The author of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot is now a US senator from Minnesota. The incumbent president of the United States publicly picked a fight with the broadcaster less than a week after being inaugurated. "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh," Barack Obama admonished attendees at a White House summit in January 2009. But tens of millions of fans do listen to Limbaugh – fans whose years of loyalty have made him the most important talk-show host in America. Those fans deserved better than Limbaugh's...

(snip)I oppose federal funding of public radio and TV on First Amendment grounds: In my view, Congress has no legitimate authority or reason to control, influence, or subsidize any domestic media. But even those who think Congress does have such power should be able to recognize that public broadcasting would be healthier and happier if it broke its addiction to taxpayer dollars. MoveOn.org, the left-wing pressure group, is promoting a petition that urges Congress to “protect NPR and PBS and guarantee them permanent funding, free from political meddling.’’ Yet political “meddling’’ is the inescapable price of taking political dollars. Conservatives...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Here's Robert in Los Angeles. Robert, welcome, sir, to the EIB Network, great to have you with us. Hello. CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It's a pleasure to talk to you. I just want to take a minute of your time and I want to ask your opinion on something. I constantly keep hearing the president and government officials saying that we need jobs, jobs, and jobs. I have the solution, and I'd like your opinion on this. Domestic manufacturing. We've lost it to China. We have a trade imbalance of about 200 to $300 billion a year....

... Most of the stuff we throw out — aluminum cans are an exception — is cheaper to replace from scratch than to recycle. “Cheaper’’ is another way of saying “requires fewer resources.’’ Green evangelists believe that recycling our trash is “good for the planet’’ — that it conserves resources and is more environmentally friendly. But recycling household waste consumes resources, too. Extra trucks are required to pick up recyclables, and extra gas to fuel those trucks, and extra drivers to operate them. Collected recyclables have to be sorted, cleaned, and stored in facilities that consume still more fuel and...

A fervent supporter of Earl Sholley’s Primary opponent, Sean Bielat, who blogs on behalf of Bielat using the screen name, demolisher, posted a thread at a Massachusetts progressive-republican website, Red Mass Group, entitled "Outstanding Jacoby article on Sean Bielat". The Boston Globe article which was essentially a puff piece by Jeff Jacoby on Bielat entitled "The man out to topple Barney Frank" was seen as an endorsement of Bielat in the Sholley camp by the influential conservative journalist and his ultra liberal Globe editors just days before the two candidates run in the Republican primary on Tuesday.Demolisher conveniently overlooked the...

SPIRIT AIRLINES put a few noses out of joint when it announced this month that it will begin charging passengers between $20 and $45 for carry-on luggage too big to fit under their seats. One of those dislocated schnozzes belongs to US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who pronounced Spirit’s new carry-on fee “outrageous,’’ and growled: “We’re gonna hold the airline’s feet to the fire on this. Because we have an obligation to do it and we have the ability to do it.’’ Asked to characterize the airline’s change of policy, LaHood asserted: “I don’t think they care about their customers.’’